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Happy All Saints Day! Celebrate with my pals Mac & Cheese.
Party over here!
In my house, November first is a day of atonement. After coping with four days of rapidly escalating, sugar-induced psychosis, my family expects something from me by way of recompense. Rightly so. And after mainlining Mars bars for a week, I must admit that it’s time to get back on the straight and narrow. Body chemistry is a mysterious thing, however, and it doesn’t always pay to swing too far too fast. In other words, avoid shocking your system with huge amounts of raw vegetables and mung beans and take a day or so to EASE back to more abstemious, healthier habits. It’s all about managing the transition, folks, and for that I rely on the old faithful – not the geyser, but macaroni and cheese.
Courtesy smittenkitchen.com
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of it all, let me offer a few crucial tips:
- Undercook the macaroni before baking or it will be too soft and mushy when you take it out of the oven. So for example, if the box calls for 10 minutes of boiling, only do 6 to 7 minutes. The mac should be less than al dente when you drain it.
- No orange cheddar cheese. Ever. For anything. The color comes from dye, and no cheese should ever be that color. Here’s the explanation if you’re interested. Read the rest of this entry
Eggs: The perfect food unit
Eggs benedict. Sublime at any time.
I love eggs as much as I hate green peppers, which is to say quite a lot. Really, can you think of any other food that is perfect for breakfast, lunch or dinner, stays fresh indefinitely and costs so little? Not even the mighty brownie, though a perfect meal at an time of the day or night, can last more than a week, even in the fridge. On the other hand, if I’m being frank, and I do try to be, brownies never last more than about an hour in my house anyway, so freshness is really not an issue. The egg, however, lends itself to infinite uses and when properly prepared is both tasty and nutritious, so let’s talk eggs.
First, quality. I’m willing to pay for free range, hormone free, vegetarian feed eggs, but I draw the line at organic. Seems unnecessary to me, but you may feel differently, and if so, go ahead and pay for them. The conditions at big chicken farms are notoriously dreadful and even though I’m not over fond of birds in general, it’s just not right to treat any of God’s creatures inhumanely, so I support the little guys who do right, or as right as can be expected, by their livestock, which is also karmically sound in my opinion. And when it comes to karma, I really can’t be too careful though, of course, I can’t speak for you.
Stuffed green peppers for dinner: Welcome to hell
courtesy Good Food Channel
Are stuffed green peppers the most nauseating food on the planet? I would argue that yes they are, with tuna and potato chip casserole running a close second. Of course, there’s always creamed chipped beef on toast to consider in a discussion of this type, but of course it could be plausibly argued that “shit on a shingle” (as we called it growing up at the mansion) does not actually qualify as food to any creature that walks on two legs, or even some who walk on four. I suppose you’d be pretty hard pressed to find a dog who’d pass it by – a cat maybe, but certainly not a dog. Fair enough.
Where was I? Oh yes, green peppers. I hate ‘em. I mean really, really loathe them – that nasty kelly green color and the horrible, bitter, mouthful-o-lawn-cuttings flavor. Almost as bad as radishes, and I don’t know why anyone would eat them, unless it’s some kind of Fifties hangover. My Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook calls for them in everything from deviled eggs to party salads to savory molded Jell-O. No lie. Come to think of it, the green pepper loomed pretty large on the culinary horizon of my youth, and let me tell you, I picked a lot of them out of my dinner during my formative years.
And yet, and still, occasionally, I have a yen for a stuffed pepper. Simple enough really, just whip the top off a red, yellow or orange pepper, tear out the seeds and membranes (membrane – isn’t that one of the most unappealing words in the English language? I have always thought so.) then stuff it with any meat / cheese / veg / rice mixture you like. Top with a little grated cheese or bread-crumb topping, bake for a half hour or so, et voila! A complete one-bowl meal, with an edible bowl.
By the way, those recipes that tell you to boil the pepper first are full of baloney. There is absolutely no need to do that, unless of course one of your dinner guests gums his food, and really that only happens once in a blue moon.
Cooking Oil: So hot it’s smokin’
That's right, I'm talkin' to YOU.
So it occurs to me that you might not be completely clear on smoke points for cooking oils, which can not only be dangerous from a flash point perspective, but also in terms of the havoc a pan full of flaming oil can wreack when you’re trying to get a damned meal on the table without burning down the house. Pardon me if you already know this stuff. Perhaps you’d like to revisit an earlier post or contemplate the baffling appeal of Erik Estrada while the rest of us discuss it.
Here we go. Cooking oils will begin to smoke at different temperatures. You don’t want oils to smoke. TV cooks may tell you that the oil in a pan needs to be on the verge of smoking, but I have never been able to pull back or avoid a conflagration once I’m that close to the edge. Too tempting. “Just a little higher, baby. Just two or three degrees more. C’mon. C’MON!” And before you can say “Freeze! LAPD!” the smoke detector is screaming, the pan’s on fire and your eyebrows are gone.
For an all-inclusive list of oils and their smoke points, check Wikipedia. It’s confusing, but complete.
For those of you with limited attention spans, these are my rough guidelines. All temps are approximate and in Fahrenheit. I have no idea what Celsius equivalents are, and I don’t care.
- As a rule the more refined the oil is, the more heat it can take and the milder its flavor. There are exceptions, but I’m not going to get into them here. I just don’t get that deep.
- Lowest smoke points are butter (350 degrees), lard (360-400) and most unrefined oils.
- Generally olive oil (365-400 or so) can take more heat, but it varies according to purity and the amount of refining.
- Other high-heat, refined oils are grapeseed (420-485), canola (400-435), sesame (410-450), peanut (440-450), corn (410-450), avocado (520) and vegetable.
If you want to sere something, use a high heat oil. To add butter flavor, mix butter with an oil that has a higher tolerance, but be careful of flavors – for example dark (or toasted) sesame oil can add a strong flavor, while corn oil has very little taste.
Pork Chops!
I was recently reminded of the lowly pork chop while watching Rachael Ray perpetrate some sort of atrocity on a pork roast – it involved ginger snaps and red cabbage and was intended to mimic some kind of wurst, though really why anyone would want to cook, let alone eat, German food (or even a reasonable facsimile) is beyond me. I know I should find Rachael endearing – millions do – but the combination of hyperactivity, that voice and the revolting food she puts out is, frankly, more than I can bear. She exhausts me. And for some reason every time I look at her I am inundated with long-repressed, terrifying memories from my childhood. I wonder why?
Moving forward, I think the pork chop is often overlooked these days, probably because so many people, like myself, were subjected to overcooked pork in their youth when the fear of trichinosis was second only to the Red Menace. Since then I have tried, on many occasions, to cook up a chop that is moist and delicious without posing a health hazard, and until recently I have failed consistently and at times rather spectacularly, I don’t mind telling you. What to do? What to do?
Kitchen Slattern 